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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Most Awesome Hardware Hack?
An anonymous reader writes: Another Slashdotter once asked what kind of things someone can power with an external USB battery. I have a followup along those lines: what kind of modifications have you made to your gadgets to do things that they were never meant to do? Consider old routers, cell phones, monitors, etc. that have absolutely no use or value anymore in their intended form. What can you do with them? Have you ever done something stupid and damaged your electronics?
Stranded on Mars, I salvaged the old Pathfinder probe to reestablish communications with NASA.
Mark Watney
>> Have you ever done something stupid and damaged your electronics?
If you haven't you don't really belong on SlashDot.
I either used Newegg.com or pricewatch.com. I ordered all my parts custom to save a couple bucks and it was good to run the latest 3d games. Everything came in the mail and I was happy... Until I realized I forgot to order a case. And not to be defeated, I took the UPS box it was shipped in, and carved out port holes. It worked well as a case. The only downside is I couldn't leave my computer on overnight to automatically play video games for me because I worried about it catching fire.
God spoke to me
I would be admitting to a felony we can't have that now, can we??
The best hack I've ever performed involved sending out a vague and remotely nerdy request to the users of website so I could turn around and write a "5 lifehacks real nerds do" Buzzfeed article.
Only having a 300 baud acoustic modem and a Tandy Color computer 2, I still wanted to run my own home written BBS. Wound up running the phone line through the cassette relay control on the Coco2.
All night long, Click, see if someone hit return at least one, click - hang up. Click - pick up, watch for return. Click - hang up.
Must have driven Thunder Bay Tel completely nuts trying to find out why someone would keep picking up and hanging up every 5 seconds or so for weeks on end. This was back in 1984. The BBS lasted about 2 years and did have a fair number of people connect in to it.
Accelerated Windows at 9.81 m/s/s. If you round it up and eliminate the units, you get Windows 10.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Was an AMD K6-2 350Mhz, Nvidia TNT2 (desktop/video games) and Creative Labs 2 x Voodoo 2 SLI boards (video games) in the late 1990's. My roommates had Intel Pentiums 233MHz systems with lousy video cards. My system blew them out of the water when it came to playing Quake 2 in OpenGL mode. Once you saw OpenGL, you didn't want to go back to software rendering. This rig played a wide variety of video games no matter what the video card requirements were.
I built an electric bike powered by old laptop batteries I collect dead laptop batteries from my employer, many of them contain lithium cells that look similar to AA's called 18650's and it's usually just a single bad cell and the rest are good. I put enough in series to give me 48v and enough in parallel to give me 50 miles of range (about 160 cells). I connected the cells together using nickle strips and a tab welder I built from an old microwave transformer. The microwave was covered in stainless steel so I cut that up and used it to build a battery box that fits perfectly in the front triangle of the bike (yes, it's insulated).
Great phone. I have not found another phone that allows for raw image sensor access, which is required to generate the quantum random numbers. Do you guys know of any?
My favorite hack of this sort didn't involve electronics at all. The building management that the company I worked rented office space from, installed motion sensors in all the offices, with a system that turned all the office lights off unless someone was actually moving in the office. I was there after 6pm almost every day, sitting quietly in front of a computer (the motion sensors didn't pick this up) so the lights kept going out. I'd have to get up from my chair, walk over to the motion sensor (installed next to the light switch at the entrance of the room), gesture in front of it so the lights would come back on for 1/2 hour or so.
I finally got a dippy bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird) and set it up with a cup of water next to the motion sensor so it fooled the thing. I had to put the bird on top of a stack of books to get it to the right height etc. I'd ask visitors why they thought I had put the bird there, and they usually didn't figure it out, but would burst out laughing when I told them what it was for. Still a fond memory.
I overclocked my graphing calculator in University. Did f-all except run a tiny bit faster and burn through batteries. Got lots of nerd-cred for it though. Ah, fun times.
Modify an old DLP projector to do 3d printing. Still something that it was meant to do sorta.
Bolt a can opener to something entirely unrelated?
No sir I dont like it.
No, really.
I once hacked a rock to keep paper from moving around. It never worked well as landscaping again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This thing. We had to make 200 frames of a laser cutter for a kickstarter.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I turned an ADM3A terminal into a fishtank, so it could continue to live on my desk and amuse me. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
First, the pictures - http://i.imgur.com/moKxZEU.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/XCtxuqg.jpg
Old, cheap $3 pair of Cube headphones found at Big Lots. Had them for years, cabling finally gave out. Came across a broken Polaroid PBT598 bluetooth speaker set, literally the only thing intact was the gumstick amp/bluetooth board, and even then it had damage, it having fried a couple of SMT capacitors, the battery and speaker trace pads were missing.
So, first order of business, get the SMT caps replaced. Easily done - just salvage components from various boards I've got around the house. Slightly trickier was exposing traces and fresh metal to solder to for battery and speaker connections. Making it fit required Dremel and hot glue work due to the shape of the headphones, and as a result the thing does look like a total hack job on the case itself.
But if I want to drown the world out in its entirety, 2x3w strapped to my head certainly does it. I can't hear my garbage disposal, vacuum cleaner, or even the neighbor's loud rap music. Volume has to be kept at pretty much 25% as anything higher, while clear (up to about 60%, then the poor speakers begin to distort) simply hurts.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
About ten years ago I decided to dust off my tele-operated car and take it for a spin. I started by plugging the red wire into the battery's negative terminal and the black wire into the positive, and watched as all the magic smoke escaped. I just stood there for 5 minutes staring down at a thousand dollar's worth of ruined electronics. Now I always use an actual black wire instead of adding a little black electrical tape to the end of a red one.
I eventually built another one a few years later. some pics.
Here's a hardware hack I need some serious help with. I've tried everything, and it seems like it's something someone out there would have figured out by now.
I have a bluetooth speaker. My phone is paired with it. I can listen to music from my phone or ipad on it via bluetooth. However, due to an accident, the input jack on the speaker (headphone size) is broken, so I am ONLY able to listen to music by pairing it.
What I would like to do is use my phone to play on two different devices, one of which is the bluetooth speaker, and the other is a regular speaker. You can't pair bluetooth with two receiving devices at once, so I can't use another bluetooth receiver for the other speaker (which does not have bluetooth). I've tried using another bluetooth receiver for the other speaker, and I can get music running through that one, but not both.
Is there a solution? Also, the bluetooth speaker, a Jawbone Jam box, has a small USB power connector for hooking up to the computer and getting updates. But as far as I know this port will not accept incoming sound.
Suggested hardware hack?
Put in a DVD drive where you flip the motor so it reads inversely and skips the DRM checking. Soldered in a mod chip onto the mainboard's debug extension. All for the purpose of being able to play backup games... Not ISOs I downloaded online and burnt on a DVD no, backup games.
Here are a couple of bodges from when I was back in school (i.e., over 25 years ago). Sadly, these projects would be more difficult for me today.
TV remote: Before TVs came with a remote control, I wired a long cable to my computer's joystick. Feedback came through speech synthesis (the TV was busy), and when I pressed the button, a servo would select the channel I wanted.
Coin relief map: I wanted to digitize the relief (imprint) on the surface of a coin. I used a pin in a capillary tube with two coils of fine wire to make a variable core transformer to measure z-height. The x-y stage was Lego Technics, with PWM controlled motors (running on an ARM2 in interrupt space). It worked far better than it ought to have.
if it was an ebook of matches, then I might be impressed.
rewriting history since 2109
Way back in the day, I soldered some Happ Controls arcade joysticks and buttons to some PC gamepads. This was when there were less than 80 games in MAME.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
This was a long time ago, but I wired up a photometer (counts photons) to an Apple 2 joystick port, then wrote a tight 6502 assembler timed loop that would count pulses on the joystick button input. It would accurately read over 50,000 button presses per second, which was good enough to do variable star photometry. I also wrote an applesoft basic program that assisted in the process of variable star photometry and used the assembler routine to read values from the photometer. By connecting the photometer to a telescope and following directions of where to aim the telescope given by the software, it could be used to observe and graph brightness of variable stars over time. Also could be used to calculate the angular velocity of asteroids. This was is the days before extrasolar planets were found, but similar in principle to how that is done. Though the objects we were looking at were orders of magnitude brighter than the brightness fluctuations observed to find planets.
I did the standard Billy Bass hack, and then connected it to the parallel port on my HP B132L+ running HPUX 10.20. I then created a character special file to use the parallel port in "raw" mode. Using a perl script, I made it play the AOL "You've got mail" sound every time new email appeared in my Netscape client. Okay, it wasn't the "most awesome" hack, but it was fun. And annoying.
I didn't have a scanner, so I hooked up an old digital camera to the USB port, and pointed it at a printer output. I fed my originals into the paper tray and printed a blank page. Took a picture some number of seconds after I started the print.
at the expense of a Motorola serial I/O chip and the dime-sized blister on my thumb. the fingerprint came back, by the way.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I used to buy single sided floppy disks and then use a hole punch to create the track index hole and the write tab. This turned it into a double-sided floppy. I'd this with good quality Verbatim disks. You could then take the disk out of the single sided drive and flip it over -- by hand -- to get double the capacity. But that was way before most of you young punks were even born. Now... get off my lawn.
Actually, my best hardware hack was an Arduino device that I turned into a product which has since sold thousands of units. 32kB flash, 2.5kB SRAM. Can send messages via the international space station.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Wire wrapped PCB containing a GPIO chip and a Z80 running my recreation of the 3" floppy protocol and a subset of PC BIOS (burned into an EPROM), a PAL with some delay lines to convert bus timings from Z80 to x86, a PC XT connector, a PC Winchester controller card which now talked to the Z80, and a 5MB? HD. The Commodore saw it as a 3" drive (which supported subdirectories) that happened to be quite a bit larger than the floppy. Later I taped up a PCB on large mylar sheets, still have the films in the garage somewhere, actually had a few of the boards manufactured for fun. (Think I had one of the chip sockets backwards, swapped IO pins on a 74?373, IIRC...) Worked nice, should have sold them. Thankful my dad funded the hobby, learned enough to open several career paths...
0. Many old IDE drives failed when the stepper drivers got flaky and when hot would crash the heads. I put them on long cables, stuffed them in a freezer compartment, and they would usually live long enough to be backed up. Seagates did this some, but Maxtors were the worst.
1. When I was asked to install a 750MB drive in an old Novell 2.15c server, it took some thinking to figure out how many disk buffers would be needed to access the drive reliably. The customer asked me to leave the DCB attached, with both 20MB drives still spinning and serving data. Doing this without powering down the DCB and drives? Priceless.
2. Going back to the same server and replacing the thinnet NIC with a gig Ethernet NIC a year later. If you configure enough packet buffers, it works... We used a number Novell had never tried.
3. A few years after this, the DCB is still running, and they call me back to install a pair of 320GB drives. More buffers. Add-on zero slot SCSI RAID controller in RAID 1 mode. Linked the driver as required, the manufacturer did this hack and wrote the driver floppy for me, as NetWare 2.15c was EOL'd at least 10 years before this card was produced. They get credit for that hack. Keeping the DCB drive spinning so they don't stop and stick? Priceless. Figuring out the LBC-CHS mapping that allowed the server use all the space? Scary. It was non intuitive, but fixed thanks to a friend who does octal math in his head to 8 places. He's weird.
4. When GroupWise 4.x wasn't quite patched up, you had some Korean jerk reflecting Yahoo addresses off it as SMTP postmaster error replies to spam the world with Yahoo Mail addresses. The server I serviced could send 200-250 million in a weekend until the disk filled with the errors. Fix was to set the MX record for the customer to a server at their ISP, teach GroupWise it's SMTP gateway was that machine, and let it properly refuse the incoming mail. GW was patched a while later for this and the big security hold that this was not part of. That ran for about 8 years. Finally Exchange worked well enough for that customer to switch.
5. There was the Novell era where we did so many weird hacks to overcome corrupted volumes, funky network routing, and Novell's figuring out the IDE driver was causing the clock to lose time, forcing us to install NTP and eventually the whole NAMP stack. Apache on Novell was not my hack.
The Selectric stuff wouldn't interest anyone here.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I turned a minifridge into a sous-vide cooker: http://peltierfridge.wordpress.com/
I once turned a $15,000 laser into a massive paperweight by turning a simple water valve from the "on" position to the "off" position.
Oh, wait, you mean a hack that did something useful? Well, I made an iPad stand out of a pile of dirty laundry, but I don't really like to brag about it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
So, to encourage us sales associates to familiarize ourselves with the kits, they gave each store in the Ottawa region an extra write-off allowance, and told us to use it opening some of the kits and playing with them, and that there would be a race among all the stores at the regional Christmas party in late November.
I was determined to win, so I asked Artie, the store manager, if adding more batteries was a violation of the "stock parts only" rule, and he said he didn't give a fuck. The motor in the kits was driven by a single 9V battery, so I opened four kits and tore the 9V leads/housings off three of them. I then added them to the remaining car, wiring all the leads in parallel, and gluing the housings to the top of the frame, where I was "supposed" to attach some sort of molded-plastic carapace that looked like an exotic street car.
We tested it on the carpet in the store and it was very fast, despite getting bogged down in the fibers. We kept it at low speeds because we didn't want to blow the engine out.
When the big night came, I put in 4 of the expensive lithium 9Vs from the top shelf. I put it down on the hard wood of the race track, next to seven other cars, each with just the stock design, despite their varied appearances. One of the visiting executives called a simple "Ready, set go!" and pandemonium ensued. You see, nobody had realized that all the sets being used were still configured with the default radio frequency settings. So the start of the race was just a burst of cross-talk, and the cars when zipping off in all directions. Our car lost three tires, as its axles spun so fast that the double-sided tape securing the tires to the rims completely delaminated.
Anyway, we eventually realized that there were not enough frequencies available to race the cars all at once, so the decided to judge the winner with a small device that simply measured the rotational velocity of the wheels and reported back an actual speed (as opposed to scale speed) in kilometers per hour. I replaced the tires on our car, and brought it to the tester. After the performance with the tires, they let me get tested last. The record car among the other seven was capable of a respectable 11 km/H. I put the car in the test bed, and gently pulled the throttle trigger up to maxim. The tester stared at it a moment, as the wheels whined away with a high-pitched scream. "Sixty six." he finally said, slowly, as if not really believing the number on the display. "Sixty..." and then motor burst into flames.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
I once used a roach clip to hold an irregularly-shaped specimen onto the stage of a scanning electron microscope.
This was at the University of Washington back in the mid 1980's, and the hack was prompted by the professor (who shall remain nameless) saying, "What we need is something like, you know, a roach clip."
I ran down to one of the many head stores on the Ave, bought a $3 roach clip, came back and affixed it to the specimen stage. It worked perfectly, and for all I know may still be in use today.
The SEM was a JEOL JSM-35C and department was involved in studying moon dust and dust borne in the high, high upper atmosphere (stratosphere?). It was colloquially called the "Department Of Interplanetary Moondust".
If you look at the images found in the google link, I actually installed at least two of those found on the first page of results. :)
Samples were collected by a U2 airplane with silicone oil-covered panels that swung down from the wings upon command. They also used thin slabs of aerogel to collect the samples on the panels, but that was much later.
And no, I'm not making this up.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Just hardware. I was about 7; we took the tubing from an old TV antenna and fashioned a hang-glider frame. I'm guessing it was about a meter wide. We painted it and while it was wet, draped a dry-cleaning bag on it using the paint as adhesive. Coat hanger wire for the crossbar and a G.I Joe and it looked awesome. At first it flew badly but we slipped a skateboard wheel bearing on to the back of one of the tubes for a balance - nearly perfect. There was a big construction project on the hill behind us. From about 75m high it made slow circles for about 5 minutes before getting stuck on the school rooftop below. Super basic, but incredibly satisfying as a 7yo.
My dad and I recently put the engine, transmission and manifolds from a totalled '94 Ford Ranger into a '96 Ford Ranger (to replace a cracked block). Despite the fact they were just 2 years apart, they were surprisingly different. Had to transfer all the manifolds and everything on the engine belt (e.g. power steering), because the '96 parts wouldn't mount on the '94 engine. Broke the '94 belt tensioner taking it off and the '96 that replaced it sat at a different angle, meaning we had to find a longer belt to compensate. Rewired the whole thing. (Except for lights) Even the wires that had a 1-to-1 match (about 80% of them) had to be extended or shortened, because the control unit was on the opposite side of the engine. Took about two months of combing through manuals and schematics to get everything wired up right. Once everything was together... Turned the key and it purred. There were a couple engine codes (I forget what they were, but we determined that it was basically the control unit saying "WTF Is going on!"). Gotta love the feeling of a hack JUST WORKING. Had to replace the drive shaft and a few cosmetic parts, and then drove it 200mi home the next day, costing me 9 gallons of gas. I've been driving it for a month since. I've heard of more impressive motor replacements, but prior to this, the most difficult repair I'd done is replacing my brake pads. Also, we broke a chain fall and "2-ton" wince, dropping both motors right after pulling the chassis out from under them. Luckily we had tires set under the good one, so it didn't crack, and neither of us were dumb enough to be underneath. That was fun. Also, I've learned I like driving a stick.
This was a lot like my "magic cat vanisher" when I was in grade school.
It was a simple device, requiring only a 9V battery and a flash cube from a camera.
Walk in room, see cat. Short terminals of flash cube while looking at cat. *FLASH*. When vision returns, cat has vanished.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I've used various bent paperclips to straighten out the mashed and mangled pins on 8P8C connectors that used proprietary wallplates and couldn't readily be replaced.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've done that before. I had (still have actually) a server that had and old Ultrawide SCSI disk as the OS drive, one day I came home and the room smelled funny. A chip on the PCB had burned up and the drive was toast. Swapped the controller board from another on and the computer came right back up and worked like a champ.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I turned an old Tasco telescope that my grandfather gave me into a rocket launcher. I replaced the spotting scope with an old scope I had for my .22 and clamped the battery pack and launch button from the Estes pad to the tube. Once I figured out, it actually worked really well. On a side note 'D' motors are really loud next to the ear. Anyways, lots of laughs and a grounding ensued. I wish I still had it.. I remember it looking pretty cool.
This one time, at band camp, I bent a paper clip to stick in that little hole on an optical drive that wouldn't eject.
> As an aside, it was a few years later when we got an actual IT staff (and before we hired the database wizard) who kicked out of my own server room. Again, I listened. That was why I'd hired them too. They, like the programmers, could do the job faster and better than I. I mean, yeah, I could make it work and did make it work but they were far more adept than I.
Sounds wise, uncommonly wise. I think I've recently called you a fool or a jerk. If so, I take it back.
Ematches are fun too.
Dear NSA, yes I do have a clearance letter from the ATF, so I'm legal to use ematches.
I hacked a rock to beat paper. Worked well, until someone hacked their scissors.
I am Audience.
I did a CD-duplicator robot too. Mine gripped the discs via the center hole, using a wooden clothespin carved to fit in the hole.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012--
a foot of water in the basement and climbing.
Not a pump to be had-- hours of phone calls revealed that I was last in line at the sump pump store; even if I could have gotten a pump there was no electricity.
Realized that we lived on a hill; set up a gravity siphon using 200' of garden hose.
Woke up the next morning to a dry basement, power came back a few hours later.
Brilliant! Inspiring! Come to the White House! Display inside the case-- just wow. Add a little C4 or a rice cooker and you've nailed it..
1. I was told that Unix couldn't dual boot with MS-DOS... so I patched the boot sector to load an alternative version of itself into RAM before system start if an unused bit was set (thus enabling DOS to boot)... so I could reboot back and forth... sometime around 1985.
2. Built a box with a Z80, 2764 EPROM, A/D converter, speech chip and a hacked together telephone interface... had 4 inputs and read the voltages of each to the caller on the phone, twice... then hung up.
3. Wrote a Forth for OS/2 in assembler... because I was told you couldn't write assembler programs in OS/2.
4. Built a system out of solar cells behind a filter, to detect infrared laser, and help align laser CATV links, with a companion box to generate a tone to feed into the transmitting laser.
5. Used a bi-color LED as light and sensor to detect a beam break to a reflector. (Green light can be detected by the red LED, but not vice-versa)
I used a #2 pencil to hack my Athlon CPU to unlock it for better overclocking.
I used to design cochlear implant electronics. A particular recipient's implant had never worked for them: I rebuilt it 3 times for more current, more voltage, and electronic electrode usage because their cochlear was basically occluded with bony growth. (It's not an uncommon cause of extreme deafness.)
Got it working, eventually, and they were able to go home with it. Since it was the first time that blind person had been able to hear, either, in the last 30 years or so, I call that a good hack.Since I was paying for components and circuit fabrication tools out of my own pocket, and staying after work to build and test new circuitry, it was also one of those "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration" results that Thomas Edison talked about.
Does liberating electricity by bypassing the meter from the utility company count?
(||) Nehmo (||)
Worked at a computer repair shop in the Packard Bell days. A person brought in a 486 Packard Bell with a bad motherboard. I had a PB motherboard from a different system that would fit but the riser card, specific to it, was too tall for the case. I told my boss it wouldn't work because the riser card was too tall. The Riser card had 3 ISA slots instead of 2 like the old one. My boss said just cut the top one off. He put the riser in a vice and cut off the top ISA slot with a Skill saw. I put the newly shortened rise card in the case. Turned on the computer. And the tested out the 2 remaining ISA using an internal modem. Some how that motherboard and cut riser card worked.
My worst fail would probably be the time I (many years ago before I understood computers as well as I do today) used glue to attach a CPU heatsink and fan to the CPU. That plus the decision to use the heatsink and fan from a Pentium 166 MMX on a 300MHz Cyrix part is probably what eventually killed the CPU.
These days I only use proper CPU thermal gunk and I use the heatsink and fan that Intel supplies with its chips (or if the chip didn't come with one, I buy the one that Intel tells me I need)
Can't think of any other hardware fails since I am not really a hardware guy.
Once upon a time I locked myself out of a running car and needed to stall it while I walked home to get the spare (pre-cell phone era). I reached under the bumper - unlatched the hood - removed the airfilter - and using a large glove in the carb slowly smothered it (and no - it didn't suck it in - but that was a worry along with a backfire). Neither happened and the car quietly died.
I've also started a car using only a screw driver.
Hey, I had an HVAC tech fix our AC once by shoving a rock under the control board to flex it - it had a cracked trace that wasn't conducting well. Rocks can fix electronics too!
Calling this one awesome might be a bit far-fetched, but it sure was a lot of fun.
My friend and I used to visit this pub every day after work. He has a background in electricity, I myself am a software developer. Arduino was new and hot, and ever since we'd both bought one we spent a lot of our evenings at a corner of the bar coming up with new projects and filling every beer coaster within range with schematics.
One night my friend arrived wearing a baseball cap reading "1 beer please", and when he wanted to order he called the bartender and pointed at the text. The bartender smiled, and then commented that the cap was not much of use whenever he wanted to order more than one beer. We all laughed about this at first, but as the night went on he continued to make the same remark, up until the point where it started to annoy us. So we went to our imaginary drawing board and started discussing how hard it would be to "improve" the cap. We ended up betting the bartender a crate of beer that we could add the necessary electronics to be able to order anything between one and nine beers, or a round for the entire bar, using only parts we had available or could salvage from old equipment, and that we would do so within a time frame of two hours.
So a few days later we arrived with the tools and parts we needed. A 7-segment display was duct taped over the "1" on the cap, and soldered to a stripped CAT5 cable. A regular led was inserted at the top of the cap, and soldered to a stripped RJ11 cable. Both cables went through the back of a sweater, and were connected to an arduino which was in the sweater's pocket. We used a basic 12 digit keypad as input, and made it so that pressing [1-9]# would display the number on the display, 0# would cause the top led to start blinking (indicating a round for the entire bar), and pressing * would turn all the led's off.
We finished well within our time frame, had lots of fun showing off the end result, and the sulky look on the bartender's face when he gave us our crate made those the best free beers ever.
One of my servers made just this weird vibration noise from the combination of spinning discs and fans. I put a piece of the end of a cut off zip tie under one corner of the server. This raised just the one corner of the server by about 2mm, just enough that the vibration sound disappeared!
(in the jolly days before digital switching)
Friend was diagnosed with cancer and was recovering from chemo in New Jersey some 1500 miles away. She ran a local ballet company for 30 years and it was to be the first time she had ever been away for their Spring performance. I was sound technician at the theater and we cooked up a scheme to telecast the performance to her. There were a several payphones outside, and I grabbed my butt-set and discovered their pairs appeared in the basement. I put a temporary jumper from one across to an unused pair of the theater's Bell 1A2 key system so it would appear up in the sound booth, put a single line phone on it with a simple phone patch (just a 600 ohm transformer, resistor and capacitor) to an output from the mixing board. A co-conspirator drove 30 miles to the house in New Jersey in which she was staying to install another phone patch into a good Hi-Fi amp and speakers. That night just before the performance I hung an 'out of order' sign on the payphone and we dialed an 800 number in the payphone line from the booth and Blue Box 2600/MF'd the call over to the New Jersey house, and patched in. During the performance one of the dance instructors sat in the house whispering into a microphone with commentary on what the dancers were doing, which went into the private mix. Cost of call: $0. It was all in place and ready minutes before the performance began, a real high-five moment because we came up with the idea to do it three hours before.
Also lots of explore sessions which I'd do from an empty conference room at the University because there were two phones there and dial-9 local toll restriction was so easy to bypass (it was 'supervised', inject quick local digits before telco dial tone). One call I made in stages: into New Jersey (Atlantic path) -> France -> Tokyo -> Hawaii -> local number (knowing it would return via Pacific path), then finally ringing the extension of the phone next to it. Literally a call manually routed around the world. Quality was awful, my 'Hello' was audible bit it sounded like 'helawk' some 2+ seconds later.
Also various random numbers to confused persons in Moscow, in Cold War days before USSR direct dial was permitted from the USA. So you bounce through France. Bouncing between UK/France a couple times then back home was loud, echo-y and strange sounding, the Brits liked their trunks piping hot.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I once soldered two safety pins on my Remco crystal radio science kit and poked them in to the phone wire leading down my parent's house. Found what I was getting for Christmas. Felt guilty and never did it again.
Then there's the intercom feature I added to my 5 tube superheterodyne radio. Speaker also acted as a microphone.
I won't get in to that.
It was a software hack to use macbook touchpad as pressure input device. I could discern 22 different levels of pressures which was more than enough to carry out deformation of free form 3d shapes. I read somewhere that the these days touchpads can easily detect 1024 different levels of pressure which is quite amazing if true.
Fire fire fire...compliments of bnb... Here beavis...
Goodwill here in Portland gave me a clear plastic slipcover for a sofa for free. I transformed it into a full length hooded clear plastic raincoat that lets my beauty shine in the rain! Clear Plastic Slipcover For A Man Hardware Hack
Most Respectfully Yours Mrs. Cleara Plastique
At the first pc repair shop I ever worked at, I came into work a little too baked one day. Spent over an hour trying to find a hardware issue, then fumbled my screwdriver and dropped it on the live motherboard. One tiny spark, and that mb was done. Replacing it solved the original problem, so no harm no foul.
I built a C64 expansion card containing 256KB of EPROM and 256KB or RAM that I could use via bank switching. As I had no fancy layout tool back then, I had to draw the layout in a paint program (taking into account that the nine needle dot matrix printer had a 216x256 raster!), matching both sides manually, print it, find a photocopier that actually reduced the size by 50% without bending it totally out of shape (I learned the hard way that photocopiers back then had the habit of being a bit fish.eyed when it comes to resizing), make the PCB, and drill a gazillion holes with a hand-kranked drill. Most vias were placed wherver there were wired elements or sockets, but quite a few vias had to be made by soldering a bit of wire on both sides. A horrible hack job in retrospective, but it worked flawlessly from the beginning!
I used my Tandy 1000ex as a tire chock for a number of years. It made an excellent weighty wedge to keep my trailer in place.
- A hardware boot selector knob wired to joystick port (the four buttons input pins) with a diode mesh to encode the 12 knob positions into binary combinations of grounded pins. Along with view bytes of assembly in MBR to boot the right partition and a .com file for DOS to chose wither to start the GUI (Win95/ W3.11) and a shell script under linux reading /dev/port to choose wither start X11 or not. That was a nice hack that allowed me to position the knob to the configuration I wanted at startup and reboot the box without the need to wait for the boot manager menu to popup so I could do something else.
- Rewiring a pin on an ISA modem card to use the IRQ6 (floppy) instead of IRQ3 or 4, this allowed me to serve one more line with my fax server
- The most epic one: I was handing around with older folks who were trying to debug a DOS program protected by a sentinel dongle connected to a parallel port the problem was that the software was using interrupt vector bytes to store the variable so as soon as it started, it was overwriting the adders of the IRQ handler used by the debugger. What I suggested was to to take a pin from the parallel port and connect it to an IRQ pin of the ISA bus. Thus when the software tried to communicate with the dongle (well, actually a couple of hundreds of cycles later), they could trigger a memory dump and analyze the code that was encrypted in memory the rest of the time.
had a MacPlus, wanted to add an Emachines BigPicture (17 inch screen).
I put in a Mac SE logicboard, a HD drive, and PC power supply, and a 200 megabyte harddisk. Attached a 17 inch Big Picture. The Mac hid partly behind the big screen , just poking out enough to provide acces to the floppy slot. Totally awesome combo!
Gaming was great too, since the slowly decaying phosphor made for smooth graphics.
http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~...
The server...
It also required soldering to access the board's serial port - all in all, very useful tinkering :-)
I used parts from discarded scanners, dot matrix and inkjet printers to make a Mendel90-style RepStrap.
I rewired a clock radio and a spare spring reverb box to run into instruments that I ran into a guitar amp for use at a noise show. Does that count?
Chemically speaking electronics are mostly rocks. Silicone and copper are both rocks.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
In my intro to electronics course we had taken the flash circuits from disposable cameras and hacked them to trigger via a photocell.
I had another idea: take the ~300v from the flash capacitor, dump it through a car ignition coil then through a spark plug, and I'd get a much more reliable spark than could be had by a piezo grill igniter. My best guess is that I had a few hundred thousand volts at the spark plug. I put everything in a small plastic Radio Shack project box, put a button on each side, and wired the buttons in series to prevent accidental discharges.
It worked very well: in ~5 years of use I think I went through two C cells and it only failed to work when the first battery died. Whenever I'd show off my handiwork, my audience was invariably more intimidated by the sound of the circuit charging up than the actual potato cannon :)
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Back in the mid '90s playing Doom and Quake using mouse look, I had a problem that my left hand would cramp up horribly from trying to handle all of the keyboard buttons.
So I took a few old mice, a copping saw, hot glue gun, and soldering iron, and made my own left hand controller.
It resembled two mice going at it. The upper mouse my hand rested on and the first segment of my pointer and middle fingers controlled the top mouse buttons, and my finger tips controlled the bottom mouse buttons. Thumb and pink controlled side buttons.
I ran the mice wires into an AT keyboard (this was either pre-USB or really early in the rollout) and solder them in as a secondary path for assorted keys.
It was the greatest thing since sliced bread IMO. These days you can get quality made left handed controllers like the Nostromo 52 and other ergonomically designed devices, so I haven't been hacking up mice any more ;)
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
He was frustrated that his $2 Mater couldn't two $2 Lightning, so I drilled a few holes and added a tow hook and hitch made from paper clips. He was happy and I had fun. I've made other hacks and fixes since then to get extended functionality out of his toys, or to make non-toys into toys. It's quite rewarding.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I made a TI-86 (& later a TI-92+) display multiple colors despite having a black & white LCD (picture here of the TI-86). I was sitting in an airport in Alaska trying to program it to do grayscale (by switching between black & white fast enough...many have done that before), but since I did not know how to program interrupts on the Z80 at that point, I just used a delay loop. I found that, for certain values of delay (depends on the remaining battery charge), it produced flashing red & green instead of black & white. More fiddling later showed that it is apparently caused by writing to the framebuffer at 100 Hz (whereas the screen refresh rate is quoted as 50 Hz), & that it was possible to get it to stop switching red & green around between flashes, but apparently not to remove the flashing effect entirely. This is probably because it has to build up stress (like when you poke a bare LCD & it makes that rainbow effect), & then it bleeds out & must be replenished periodically (although I might just have the timing slightly off, even though I switched to interrupt-based timing).
Way back in 1984 I discovered that as long as you were using a monochrome text or graphics adapter (Hercules) you could replace the 14.318MHz crystal with a higher frequency ( I think I got as high as 22MHz for 7.33MHz CPU clock). The software clock would run fast, but it was worth it for the speed boost. About 9 months later companies started offering turbo mother boards that would operate at 4.77MHz or 8MHz switch-able.
Soldered a rather large capacitor on the power side of an amplifier on a circuit board and reversed the polarity accidently.
Plugged it in and hit power. Destroyed the rest of the components around it and stunk up the house for a week
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
I've used various bent paperclips to straighten out the mashed and mangled pins on 8P8C connectors that used proprietary wallplates and couldn't readily be replaced.
In my youth of steady hands and keen eye, I was often able to repair scratched records that got stuck repeating, by straightening out the grooves with the corner of a razor blade.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I didn't think I had a story here, thanks for reminding me of my potato cannons!
In my intro to electronics course we had taken the flash circuits from disposable cameras and hacked them to trigger via a photocell.
I had another idea: take the ~300v from the flash capacitor, dump it through a car ignition coil then through a spark plug, and I'd get a much more reliable spark than could be had by a piezo grill igniter. My best guess is that I had a few hundred thousand volts at the spark plug. I put everything in a small plastic Radio Shack project box, put a button on each side, and wired the buttons in series to prevent accidental discharges.
It worked very well: in ~5 years of use I think I went through two C cells and it only failed to work when the first battery died. Whenever I'd show off my handiwork, my audience was invariably more intimidated by the sound of the circuit charging up than the actual potato cannon :)
Mark my words, the nation which controls potatoes will rule the world. Ireland will rise again.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
my new pellets stove had broken down. As all the mechanical parts seemed to work, it had to be the electronics. Called in the repair man, who changed the flame sensor. Thing still didn't work. After 2 days, temperature in the living room had dropped to about freezing point, with my partner huddling on the couch in blankets and jackets. So I took the fucking thing apart, checked everything meticulously, discovered that the fucking flame sensor had been mounted with wrong fucking polarity. Fired up stove, called repair man, who apologized and had a crate of beer delivered.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I had one of those old iBook laptops that had the white paint you could remove by soaking in alcohol, which left the case transparent. But the naked electronics were boring to look at. So I lined the case with some of that thermal sheeting that changes color when it gets hot. My iBook became a a mood ring, changing color depending on how hot the internals got.
I used to drive a Heisenberg, but every time I glanced at the speedometer, I'd get lost.
My best hack was closing the window curtains to get a mouse to work. It quit working one weekend and I bought another one for a few bucks. Next weekend the same problem came up. I thought about cleaning it, but remembered it was brand new. The old cheap mouse had a thin casing and a ball tracker moving wheels with spokes. It worked OK at night, but during the day the sun hit the side of the mouse and lit up the motion sensors, making it unresponsive. Can you imagine phoning a help desk complaining about a mouse problem and they tell you to close the drapes.
Like many slashdotters at one time I unintentionally collected a lot of old obsolete computer hardware. I've cut it back a lot in recent years, but it was fun for a time to have a bunch of really old systems and to try and use them for something...
So two hacks:
The first was I got an old laptop from my grandmother (which I only threw anyway this past year lol!). It was an old 386. It ran GEOS. for useful things I did all my COBOL programming in university on it (don't need a lot of power for that), I also did some C coding. Anyway at one point I decided that I wanted to try and throw Linux on it. The problem was that the HD on it was TINY. I can't remember exactly but it was probably something like 5-20MB in size. The smallest current distro of Linux at the time was DSL (Damn Small Linux), however even that was a monumental 50MB in size, far too large for the HD... However I DID have old parallel Zip drive collecting dust also. So I managed to hook it all up and install DSL onto the Zip drive across the parallel port. I tried to boot it, and it was successful. Sort of. Two things, one was that the boot time was 20+ hours until it managed to work its way through the boot process and post an active command prompt. Second was while you could enter commands, and it would process them, each entry would take a couple minutes to work (was probably more like many seconds, but seemed like forever), It was if anything like a simulator of remotely computing on the moon with a time delay. Anyway I was kind of please that I got it to work and I thought it was pretty funny, though it was pretty unusable for any real purpose so it didn't really last very long. Though DSL was probably still loaded on that Zip disk when I finally threw that anyway also.
The second thing was again using obsolete hardware that I just had hanging around. This time in comparison a massive P3 800mhz processor attached to an anchor of a computer in a DELL 4200 Dimension (back when Dell actually made over engineered quality computers). Anyway being one of the guys that was more technically capable I had a friend that had an old computer that had died, and wanted me to grab all their photos and such off the two hard drives and dump them on a newer 1TB external drive. I said sure, thinking it would be easy, I'd just unhook the drives, connect them to my new computer (a Core 2 Duo E4200 at the time I think), and Bob's your uncle transfer the files and done. However of course the drives in question were ATA not SATA, so that wouldn't work. However the old Dell still worked, so I figured I would just do the same, I forgot that I had also messed around with Linux on it as well using the new to then LiveCD's... So I actually didn't have an OS installed on the thing. Not wanting to bother installing an actual OS on the thing, I just hooked up the drives, and booted to the LiveCD. Two things to note, the dives in question were actually pretty large for the time, one was probably 160GB and the other a huge 320GB and they were more less full of crap. The other is that my Dell had (with an upgrade) 256MB of RAM, which combined with probably a 2x CDROM LiveCD OS didn't help much. Anyway, I booted it up, set up the copy process, and waited.... and waited... and waited... and got sick of waiting. So it had a progress bar (two, as I did both at once, also probably didn't help), that very very slowly progressed. I kept waiting for it to fail, but it didn't. I would check on it when I got home from work. In any case about 48 hours later, it finished successfully... So again I was kind of pleased with myself and had a bit of a laugh at the same time and my buddy got to recover whatever crap he had on his old PC...